Survival Techniques

How Two People Faced The Loss Of Those They Loved

December 18, 1988|By Reviewed by Michael Dorris, author of the novel ``Yellow Raft in Blue Water`` and the forthcoming ``The Broken Cord.``

Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

By Paul Monette

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 342 pages, $18.95

Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

By Madeleine L`Engle

Farrar Straus Giroux, 232 pages, $18.95

In the anticipation of grief we catalog the magnitude of loss, and nothing is ultimately more costly than a bond of true attachment. Basic to the mythos of romantic declaration is the pledge ``I cannot live without you,``

and for the partner who`s dying, at least this much has proven true. There is, of course, the worry for the lover left behind, abruptly deprived of every gift one had to give. But for the dying, this ache, like the fatal disease itself, is terminal.

For the survivor, though, one antidote is to create a memorial-not only to the memory of the deceased but also to the very significance of mutual devotion, a testimony proclaiming to a society focused on tomorrow that who and what went before mattered and continues to matter. Such proof is made tangible by art, and in ``Borrowed Time`` and ``Two-Part Invention`` Paul Monette and Madeline L`Engle relate their respective experiences in bereavement. That the former book`s subtitle is ``An AIDS Memoir`` and the latter`s ``The Story of a Marriage`` is incidental to their similarity; love is love, grief is grief and suffering has no sexual preference.

It may come as a surprise to discover that, among its many virtues,

``Borrowed Time`` is a gripping read, a page-turner. Though we know what`s ahead, this love story is never maudlin and often punctuated with humor. Monette, a poet, novelist and screenwriter, paints an eloquent portrait of Roger Horwitz. ``I never felt quite comfortable calling Rog my lover,`` he writes. ``To me it smacked too much of the ephemeral, with a beaded sixties topspin. Friend always seemed more intimate to me, more flush with feeling. Ten years after we met, there would still be occasions when we`d find ourselves among strangers of the straight persuasion, and one of us would say, `This is my friend.` It never failed to quicken my heart, to say it or overhear it.``

Monette met Horwitz, an attorney and scholar, in Boston in 1974. ``We weren`t kids anymore,`` Monette writes. ``We`d been hurting dull as a toothache for years. When we came together as lovers, we knew precisely how happy we were.`` Together they moved to Los Angeles, bought a house, made a life, fitted into each other`s families, overcame the normal adjustments of a longterm adult relationship. Then one day, on the answering machine, came the news of an old friend`s strange assortment of symptoms, and AIDS became the central anxiety of their lives.

``Borrowed Time`` is the journal of the battle to ``get over the horror that we might die so we could begin to see we weren`t dead yet,`` and it is an eloquent, moving and comprehensive account. Within its pages we meet the brave and the cowardly, and we witness the growth of moral strength, sometimes in inverse proportion to the decline of physical well-being. Horwitz, Monette and their parents emerge as complex, tender and courageous people, the more so because they are humanly imperfect in their responses to calamity. As the disease progresses, so too does our empathy; when the book is done, AIDS can never again be an abstract or a distant malady.

``You live alone, you die alone,`` Monette`s doctor told him. ``Not us, I thought, as the rage began to build. . . . White-hot rage is the only thing that keeps you going sometimes.`` And a focus for that rage was a perceived indifference, even an antagonism, toward the problem on the part of the federal government, evidenced by it slowness in funding the development of drugs like AZT. `` `God`s punishment` was the major level of public debate in 1985,`` Monette writes. ``Hate, it appeared was the only public health tool available.``

Yet the matters that must be addressed in ``Borrowed Time`` before the answering machine tolls the news of Roger Horwitz`s passing, finally boil down to the question ``What happened to our happy life?`` and the need ``to see how a man of honor faces death without any lies.``

Those entwined concerns also run through ``Two-Part Invention,`` the vivid, touching chronicle of Madeleine L`Engle`s literary and theatrical career, of her satisfying 40-year long marriage to actor Hugh Franklin and of his brutal illness and death. ``Love of music, of sunsets and sea; a liking for the same kind of people; political opinions that are not radically divergent; a similar stance as we look at the stars and ink of the marvelous strangement of this universe-these are what builds a marriage,`` L`Engle writes. Her prose style is quieter, more self-reflective, more at a distance than Monette`s, but they have been through the same fire. ``I go to my lonely bed, thinking of Hugh alone in his hospital room, grateful for the nurses who are so good to him,`` she writes. ``During the night I reach out with my foot through force of habit to touch his sleeping body. And he is not here.``